Planetary Stewardship

Historical development

The framework grew out of the global change science of the 1980s and 1990s, including the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and out of Paul Crutzen’s naming of the Anthropocene in 2000. Johan Rockström, Will Steffen and colleagues proposed the planetary boundaries in Nature in 2009 and updated them in Science in 2015. A paper by Steffen and colleagues in Ambio in 2011, “The Anthropocene: From global change to planetary stewardship”, named the political response.

Carl Folke’s resilience thinking and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Frank Biermann’s Earth System Governance project, and proposals for a World Environment Organisation gave it institutional shape. The boundaries have been taken up in European and corporate policy and shaped the Sustainable Development Goals. They have also drawn criticism from several directions.

Principal claims

• Humanity has become a planetary force. The stable conditions of the Holocene, which civilisation depends on, are being destabilised.
• Science can identify planetary boundaries, and several have already been crossed.
• Governance has to match the scale of the system. That means global institutions with the authority and capacity to keep humanity inside the boundaries.
• Active management of the Earth system is now unavoidable. It runs from monitoring to restoration and, for some, to intervening in the climate.
• Science should inform policy continuously, and long-term thinking has to be built into institutions.

Policy implications

Planetary stewardship calls for binding international frameworks for climate, biodiversity and the global commons, stronger UN environmental institutions, and targets based on planetary boundaries in national policy. It wants the Earth system monitored, ecosystems restored and protected on a large scale, including through the target of protecting 30 per cent by 2030, and scientific advisory bodies with real standing. It supports research on climate intervention within a framework of governance.

Internal disagreements

Supporters disagree about how strict the boundaries are and how firm their scientific basis is. They differ on growth. The framework takes no official position, and both green growth and degrowth claim it. They argue about whether geoengineering is acceptable, about how global institutions can be democratic and legitimate, and about how to bring in justice and the global South, which work on “safe and just” boundaries in the 2020s tries to do.

Criticisms and controversies

Political ecologists and decolonial critics see planetary stewardship as a technocratic, Northern way of governing the earth. In their view it takes the politics out of environmental conflict and risks authoritarian management of the globe. Defenders of national sovereignty reject global authority. Some scientists dispute how precise the boundary concept is, and authoritarian readings of the framework worry its own proponents.

Supporters argue that planetary problems need planetary institutions, and that without them the boundaries will simply be crossed with no one managing the consequences.

Relationships to other traditions

Planetary stewardship is the scientific framework behind much of sustainable development and green liberalism, and a partner of ecological engineering and restoration. It is an uneasy neighbour of ecomodernism, which accepts its science and rejects its limits, and of eco-authoritarianism, which accepts its centralism and rejects its liberalism. Environmental nationalism opposes it, as do traditions that favour decentralisation, from social ecology to Indigenous sovereignty. Climate justice advocates criticise it for paying too little attention to fairness.